Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
Source: Lorie Shaull (https://www.flickr.com/photos/number7cloud/32568282327)
Julián Castro’s campaign isn’t getting a lot of attention. Admittedly, I’d have probably forgotten about him as well, if not for the fact that I know people caucusing for him in Iowa or thinking about doing so. He’s polling very badly.
But Castro’s worth a look. He seems to be running the leftmost campaign other than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And, on closer inspection, I think that assessment holds up well enough. I’ve written a couple of posts on Sanders and one on Warren. Castro merits one, too.
Here’s what’s going on with his campaign, as I see it.
Image Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/12/18221752/2020-democrats-biden-bernie-sanders-beto-poll)
Quite a few people seem surprised by Joe Biden’s lead in the polls. Some of this is because their friend circles aren’t representative of the Democratic Party electorate. But some of it’s deeper than that. Democrats say in generic polls that they’d prefer women to men, non-white candidates to white candidates, and younger candidates to older candidates. Given the fact that Democrats are more or less evenly divided between moderates and liberals, we could form some hypotheses about who ought to be leading right now.
The best hypothesis would be Kamala Harris. She’s a black women who’s probably neither too liberal nor too moderate for the Democratic electorate. She’s youngish and serves in a political office that’s a common launching pad for presidential campaigns. And we’d expect candidates like Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar to be doing OK. We might even think candidates like Julián Castro could take off.
To put it lightly, that’s not what we’re seeing. The two leading candidates, as of May 2019, are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Two white guys older than any president-elect in the history of the US. Biden is arguably too conservative for the Democratic electorate, and Sanders is well to the left of the electorate. Even moving beyond Biden and Sanders, we have Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren as four of the top five. Warren isn’t as far left as Sanders, but she’s still well to the left of most Democrats. And Buttigieg is a white guy.
What’s going on here?
Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Warren_speaks,_May_19,_2014.jpg)
2004 was the first year I was old enough to vote in presidential elections, and I quickly found it’s a depressing experience. But it’s easy to do. I’ll start thinking about voting for someone once I’m convinced they’ll work hard to leave the world a better place than they found it. Democratic presidential candidates never met that standard, so I never seriously considered voting for one. Depressing, but easy. Bernie Sanders complicated that in 2016. He met the standard, but he lost to Hillary Clinton. But what if there were a candidate clearly to Hillary Clinton’s left, and still to the right of Bernie Sanders? Did someone say ‘Elizabeth Warren’?
What’s going on with the Warren campaign? That’s my topic here.
Leftist activists disagree with one another. In other news, bears shit in the woods, the Pope is Catholic, etc. This disagreement is the cause of Twitter conflicts ranging from polite discussion to dumpster fires. How should we handle these conflicts? Should we try to get along? When? How can we tell when we’re taking conflicts too far?
Without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?
I’ll address some of these questions in this post. Probably not the one from The Simpsons.
© 2024 Base and Superstructure
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
